ABSTRACT
As Donaldson et al. (2013, 606) suggest, a pragmatist framework of this kind is not “opposed to other approaches to political analysis,” and we contend that it offers a methodology more widely applicable within UPE. For example, analyses emphasizing the role of hegemonic projects in shaping socioenvironmental change could deploy such a framework to trace the specific means-documents, practices, events, and so on-through which such projects articulate and assemble a public interest and translate it into normalized routines of everyday life. One challenge for future research will be to identify additional means through which issues travel between the most and least controversial points within their trajectories; another will be to conceptualize the relationships among these means, along with the historically and geographically specific configurations that enable them to have effects. Under what circumstances do circulating translations of knowledge or desire-or both in combination-generate disruption of a legislative process or consolidate consensus in a process of deliberation? Are there predictable patterns in issue trajectories, or is each one irreducibly unique? As for the normative aspiration of much UPE to “enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction,” a pragmatist approach can lend specificity to what this “enhancement” might require under different sets of conditions (Fuller 2013).
